


Neutron

by Basingstoke



Category: Hard Core Logo (1996)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2000-11-01
Updated: 2000-11-01
Packaged: 2017-10-02 15:35:44
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 665
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7942
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Basingstoke/pseuds/Basingstoke
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>many thanks to wax jism for convincing me to post this and for turning me onto HCL to begin with.</p>
    </blockquote>





	Neutron

**Author's Note:**

> many thanks to wax jism for convincing me to post this and for turning me onto HCL to begin with.

So that's Joe, and that's Billy, and they've been together for twenty-one years. How about that? Even when they were apart they were together.

 

 

Billy, isn't he pretty? Joe thinks so. Joe's not so pretty, he used to be prettier but he's been living pretty hard for the past twenty years. Billy was living pretty hard too but he had someplace to put it other than his skin.

 

 

Billy has this silent place inside, a place that doesn't move, like a deep-sea trench covered with glowing heat-eating tube worms and flowing with heavy water.

 

 

There's two kinds of water: regular water and heavy water. Regular water is good old H2O, two hydrogens attached to an oxygen by a covalent bond, the whole making up this thing that can sometimes be a gas but prefers to hook up with its buddies and fall to the ground; then there's heavy water, which flows beneath the regular water, and it's just water with extra baggage. Your regular hydrogen isotope is called protium, because it's just one. One proton all by itself. But then you have deuterium, which is also hydrogen but the little proton has a buddy, a neutron; so it's two but it's still one. One atom. Two particles stuck together make one atom, and it's all hydrogen. Isn't that nice?

 

 

(There's a third kind of hydrogen called tritium, but it's radioactive. It has a half-life of twelve years. Two's buddies but three's a fucking crowd, and eventually that neutron and that proton gang up on the extra neutron and turf it out in a puff of gamma radiation.)

 

 

You can put water together with regular hydrogen, or you can put it together with buddy hydrogen, and it's all water, but the buddies kind is heavy water.

 

 

So that's Billy. Silent place. Heavy water. Deuterium.

 

 

Billy stands behind Joe, letting him bull his way through, letting him shine. Billy has his back. You want to get to Joe, you need to go through Billy. It makes Billy tired though. Sometimes he just wants to be one person rather than two people. Sometimes he gets sick of letting Joe overflow into his silent places, letting Joe fill him up. Sometimes he needs to empty out. So sometimes he leaves. But he always comes back.

 

 

Now, Joe, Joe, he doesn't have silence, he doesn't have that still place. His skin is too small for what's boiling inside--it all comes spilling out his mouth. And he runs and spins around, but in the end he's just in orbit around Billy. Let's play dwarf star and gas giant, Billy. You be the cold white-burning sun and I'll be the enormous, brilliant planet that can't get away. Does that sound fun?

 

 

Joe's never thought of it that way. All Joe knows is that he *needs Billy* in ways both sacred and profane, and that he's happiest when Billy is close enough to touch. Touching Billy, poking Billy, punching Billy, kissing Billy, singing with Billy, drinking with Billy, fighting with Billy, smoking with Billy, fucking with Billy--sometimes--if he's lucky. Mostly he's not, because Billy doesn't get that close to anyone. Even Joe. Poor Joe.

 

 

Poor Joe. Poor Billy. Because Joe needs Billy, because otherwise he'd just be a ball of hot air with nothing to spin around to keep him together. Because Billy needs Joe, because a star without a planet is a star without a buddy, and that's no place to be. No place at all.

 

 

So where are they? They're no place. If you'll draw your attention to the deuterium again, that creation of one proton and one neutron; if you split up that atom--like maybe through an explosion of the nuclear kind, the kind that turns the desert to glass--then you get one proton by itself, and that's hydrogen; and then you get one neutron by itself, and that's nothing. No name. No charge. No buddy. Nothing.

 

 

And that's tragedy. Poor Billy. Poor Joe.

 

 

end.


End file.
